Cereal At Midnight

  As far as your midnight movie plots go, there's nothing inherently unique about Trip with the Teacher . On the surface, this is your standard "mad motorcycle maniacs terrorize the innocent" plot, but it's done with so much style and at least one particularly stunning performance that it easily stands out against similar films. Brenda Fogarty ( The Beach Bunnies ) is a prim and proper teacher who is leading a handful of her female students (including Cathy Worthington in her debut) on an expedition into the desert to observe some Native American artifacts. Jack Driscoll ( Garden of the Dead ) is their bus driver, a stout man who is the spitting image of Sterling Hayden ( The Godfather ), circa 1957. Elsewhere in the desert, two motorcyclists, played by Zalman King ( Galaxy of Terror ) and Robert Porter ( Mackenna's Gold ), are broken down on the side of the road. Another motorcyclist happens upon them, played by Robert Gribbin ( Hitch Hike to Hell ), and when...

I've begun working my way through Mill Creek's "Drive-In Cult Classics: 32 Movie Collection," which is comprised entirely of films from the Crown International catalog. That studio was (is?) one of the biggest names in cult, exploitation, and low-budget fare; when I think of the seventies grindhouse movies with chunka-bow-bow funk scores and flashy cinematography, I'm becoming more and more aware of the role Crown International actually played in creating those cliches.In researching these movies from the set, I'm seeing a lot of one-sentence or one-paragraph reviews, as if the craziness or brilliance or cheesiness contained in each Crown International movie could be  encapsulated or dismissed with a single statement. I was bothered by the trend, so here's my attempt to do service to the movies that demand more than that (some of them don't demand more than that), starting with a movie that I don't think has gotten its due. Pick-Up  is a 1975 f...